Following the devastating hurricanes of 2022 and 2024, Sanibel and Captiva—barrier islands along Florida’s southwest coast—saw near-total destruction of their built fabric. A storm surge approaching fifteen feet, paired with extreme winds, exposed the increasing volatility of weather events and the fragility of the islands’ conventional building practices, underscoring the need for a more resilient architectural approach—one capable of withstanding future storms while remaining aligned with Sanibel’s casual, quirky artful character. In addition to the loss of homes and tourism infrastructure, the island’s conservation and scientific networks were heavily disrupted.

The La Gorce Family Intern Village responds to this rupture as a reconstitution of a conservational and educational lineage that has shaped the islands for over five decades. Under the stewardship of the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation (SCCF), the project reestablishes a locus of fieldwork and residency, providing housing for researchers, ecologists, and conservationists whose work sustains Florida’s wildlife and coastal ecosystems.

At the heart of the campus, shared structures — an exterior amphitheater, a connective deck, and a pavilion — create a sequence of communal spaces that foster exchange and education. The amphitheater, carved as an over-scaled circular clearing between two housing buildings, acts as an informal daily living room and a flexible public space for field classes, lectures, or performances. The east–west deck connects with the island’s “Conservation Corridor,” stitching the Village into a network of institutions including the Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge, the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum, the CROW Wildlife Clinic, and SCCF’s headquarters. The pavilion, conceived as the campus’s family room, accommodates shared meals, workshops, and hands-on ecological learning.

Architecturally, the project draws from the pragmatic vocabulary of coastal Florida: elevated houses, deep roofs, screened rooms, and simple carpentry. Large square windows align beneath a continuous datum of thick trim tucked under the roof eave. Smaller operable apertures punctuate the elevations, recalling the rhythmic ventilation windows of Old Florida cupolas. The white balustrades—drilled with alternating holes—carry a faint, abstracted echo of the island’s ‘gingerbread’ ornamentation.

Each housing building is organized around an engaged porch, a recessed and screened outdoor room that anchors the plan. Shaped as a triangle, the porch reduces interior corners and mitigates wind pressure during hurricanes. It increases points of roof attachment and consolidates the vulnerable roof edge to a single side. The deep overhang controls solar exposure along the highly glazed shared spaces. The porch presses gently into the shared programs of the plan – kitchen, living, and dining areas – introducing spatial differentiation without interrupting continuity. Inside, a wall of green-stained millwork marks the dramatic vaulted kitchen elevation.

Bedrooms line the private northern edge of each building, while the southern side opens toward the public deck, mediating between communal and individual life. A compact central core consolidates building infrastructure.

Resilience drives the project’s architectural and structural systems. The hip roof alleviates wind pressure, and the compact rectangular plan minimizes long, exposed elevations. Eaves are kept slight to reduce uplift while still protecting openings. Buildings are elevated an additional five feet above FEMA’s base flood elevation on concrete piers and precast planks, allowing floodwater to move freely beneath. Long rectangular piers act as shear elements, reducing the need for continuous breakable walls at grade while avoiding costly perimeter moment connections. 

Taken together, the La Gorce Family Intern Village proposes a modest, adaptive model for barrier-island preservation—architecture operating as both shelter and field instrument. It is a place for living and learning, attuned to climate and ecology, and imagines forms of coexistence between human habitation, scientific practice, and the coastal environment. 

In its totality, the La Gorce Family Intern Village seeks to establish a benchmark for barrier-island preservation—an architecture that is adaptive, modest, and attuned to its climatic and ecological context. It operates as both shelter and field instrument, translating the pressures of wind, surge, and shifting climate into a series of compact, elevated forms that accept the storm rather than oppose it. The architecture reframes Sanibel’s casual, artful sensibility through contemporary means, allowing its deep roofs, screened voids, and simple geometries to hold both the beloved character of the island and the intensifying weather that will continue to shape it.

Plum Island House celebrates the vernacular, the voluptuous, and the volumetric. Rising from the dunes of a New England barrier island, the house appears as a found object. Cedar shingles generate new form while responding to existing conditions: patterning a gradient over the façade that both invites and receives weathering; mediating seamlessly as three curvilinear volumes peel back from their orthogonal base.

Carr House gathers the geology of Johnstown, Ohio, into an above-ground shelter. Rubble discarded from local limestone quarries is collaged into liquid concrete; when cured, the composite assembly is tilted vertically. Exterior corners slip past right angles, exposing volumes that are both rugged and smooth. Carr House reappraises the value of debris, utilizing riprap as a finish material.

Serriframe keeps a low profile as it tiptoes through Boston’s neighborhoods. The system borrows brick to knowingly subvert it, rendering a reverse bond pattern in weathered steel. Serriframe is conspicuous camouflage: rigidly versatile, materially transparent. Experienced in motion, Serriframe becomes a flicker in the urban scene.

Tesuque Studio is a concrete tilt-up structure that hovers between earthbound and ethereal. Five walls are poured directly on the ground, taking its texture with them into the vertical plane. Flat formwork translates to a five-sided volume as curved edges collude in three cylindrical roof slopes. The resulting building, a ceramic workshop and gallery in Tesuque, New Mexico, all but dissolves into its desert site.

Halo is part-salon,  part-school, and part-clinic, designed for women and girls coping with cancer. Multiple compounding textures present the idea of “cosmetic” as generating both ornament and figure. Perimeter walls emulate the sensibilities of their surface material: playful, dreamy, and cloud-like.

Somewhere between puffy shingles (a New England staple), an heirloom quilt, and the loose fit of a favorite pair of jeans, the pavilion speaks to the familiarity and nostalgia of our collective favorite things. 56 quilted panels are stuffed with recycled denim turned into building insulation and supplemented with fabric waste from the garment industry. The result is a chromatic speckling and indigo hue. Casually draped over the frame, each puffy panel invites us to walk, bump, hug, and lounge freely between the pillow-like walls.

Originating in Bavaria in the early nineteenth century, the Biergarten was never just about beer. Beneath buckeye trees planted to cool underground cellars, families gathered in what were essentially private gardens opened up to the public. The biergarten was part infrastructure, part backyard, part social experiment—a place where everyday life spilled outdoors.

HillGarten brings this spirit to a contemporary North American main street. Set on a once-neglected site in Hilliard, the project sits at the transition between a residential neighborhood and the downtown commercial district. Neither fully park nor fully restaurant, HillGarten operates as an active shared landscape—one that belongs equally to families spread out on blankets, college students gathering around long tables, and retirees lingering by the fire pits.

A continuous hardscape path loops through the site, tying together the food-and-beverage pavilion, porch, stage, fire pits, seating areas, and lawn. The circuit makes it easy to wander, find your friends, and settle in. Long communal tables recall the shared seating of traditional biergärten, while smaller clusters tucked among plantings offer places to linger. Shifts between gravel and grass subtly change how the space feels underfoot, signaling different rhythms of use. Custom planters filled with buckeye trees—traditional to the biergarten—help shape these areas and bring shade and scale to the garden.

Anchoring the project is a simple food pavilion with a translucent polycarbonate porch, supported by custom “belly” columns. Together, they create a shaded place to gather, order a drink, or just hang out.  The porch’s belly columns are hand-planed from solid white oak by a local barn builder. Oversized and deliberately tactile, they invite people to lean against them, wrap an arm around them, or even give them a hug. Their presence brings a sense of unusual familiarity, rooting the project in local craft.

HillGarten is less a single building than a loose collection of spaces stitched together through movement and use. Its character takes shape through simple, everyday moments—walking the loop, sharing a table, drifting between lawn and fire pit. Like the biergarten before it, the project comes alive through people, shifting with the seasons, the crowd, and the time of day. Open-ended by design, HillGarten is an architecture meant to be used casually and collectively, improving the more it’s live

Botanical Court inverts an outer perimeter inward. Housing McMaster University’s Palm collection, the greenhouse becomes vertically attenuated in section and dimensionally thin in plan, wrapping around a central public courtyard that enjoys 360 degree views of the palms, without compromising the integrity of the greenhouse ecosystem.

Library offers a continuous experience – a labyrinthian loop of bookshelves, crenelated to produce individualized spaces. The sinuous organizational form is revealed surrounding a central garden.

Dimple Chair combines traditional handcraft with digital fabrication. Timeless woodworking techniques shape the chair’s figure, while the pre-programmed CNC machine carves sundry impressions into the grain of the seat.

Tilt-Up Pavilion brings a playful approach to generic construction techniques. Five concrete walls are poured on-site and hoisted into place, their exposed edges revealing – layer after layer – the time it took to make them. Cold joints, pick points, and structural embeds become central actors, as the construction process reveals its theatrical leanings.

Phantom Fictions asks if mirage can be material. Situated in the Straits of Messina, this proto-architecture measures atmospheric gradations while visually indexing them, perpetuating the fiction of Fata Morgana with air as both material and performer.

Kaffeology is a cafe composed of curves surfaced in plaster.